Gathering Clouds

From the Picasa album Clouds Over Tucson

Carly is asking to see clouds for this week's Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot. If my cable connection ever comes back up, I will show you Monday's clouds. Carly's timing was perfect: the skies over Tucson put on a bit of a show Monday, part of the prelude to the early monsoon the meteorologists are expecting.

I actually rotated this shot 90 degrees before I noticed from the palm tree at the bottom that it didn't need rotating. It was taken in front of my house. I've cropped out the neighbor's tree from the right side of the shot, and brightened the remaining image quite a bit.

From the Picasa album Clouds Over Tucson

This is a portion of the first photo above, which can be seen in even larger form on Picasa. I love the colorful lens flares.

Clouds over the Catalinas.

Clouds over the dog park.

Clouds over the amphitheater.

My favorite shots are often of the combination of clouds and sunset. It's often clouds that make a sunset special, and vice versa. Monday's sunset, ironically, was a dud, but here are some colorful sunset clouds from a few days ago.

The reason the cable connection is down, apparently, is that there was a fire in the alleyway a few hours ago, which they just put out. There are still emergency vehicles perhaps five houses away from us. (Well, there were when I wrote that - they've just driven away.) According to the Southwest Gas line inspector who just discovered a gas leak behind our very own house a few minutes ago, someone set a couch in the alleyway on fire. The fire spread to the gas main, and whoosh! I didn't see it, had no idea. I only knew that people and vehicles have been going by in the alleyway, accompanied by much barking from the neighborhood dogs. Anyway, most of the activity seems to be over for the moment, but the Southwest Gas guy is still out there, and a repair crew will be by this morning to cut off the leaky gas line that used to go to the rusty old pool heater that's been broken since before we bought the house. Well, I say it's broken. John seems to think he just chose not to mess with it, even when we were actively using the pool.

Be sure to check Carly's blog Ellipsis every week for the EMPS topic, and for links to the previous week's participants. Why not get in on it this week, and photograph some clouds?

Karen